ANDRE BEGIN

If there is any doubt as to whether Mother Nature has a sense of humour, I think it is safe to say that she does given how hair can be such a vast universe of contradictions.

People with curly hair want straight hair. People with straight hair want wavy hair. Fine hair is teased into gravity-defying structures, while thick hair is ironed to look sleek and chic.

Sometimes we make it do things it just wasn’t meant to do.

And as we get older, Mother Nature is not through with us yet. Oh no! The fun is just beginning.

In my case, in my 40s, she took it away a few strands at a time. She might have thought she was sneaky, but I fought back by getting a clipper cut. Problem solved, or so I thought.

Who could guess that her punchline would be the random places where she is putting it back in my 50s?

I fully expected that after age 50, trimming nose hairs would become a necessity to avoid looking like a catfish. I also expected that I might need to keep my eyebrows in check so that they didn’t look like wings and suddenly take flight in the middle of a serious boardroom meeting.

I am very lucky that I am fair haired (or at least, I was) so new stray sprouts haven’t been too noticeable. But those new “platinum” ones (btw, I love saying “platinum” as I think it oozes coolness) do catch one’s eye faster. Thankfully, there is no shortage of grooming tools to keep new growth under control.

But just when I think I have caught all of the new sprouts of platinum hair, it just takes a look in the mirror and a reflection of light at the right angle to see something I missed showing up in another weird place.

For example, I was surprised to see that my eyebrows haven’t been growing together into a classic unibrow. Mother Nature has other plans for me. My eyebrows are growing downward. It’s like the eyebrows have plans to rendez-vous with the eyelashes somewhere in the middle.

Every once in a while, I have to take out the tweezers and pluck stray hairs from my eyelids. Let’s just say that the experience is not the most fun given the sensitivity of the ocular area, but fortunately, the plucking is usually over quickly enough despite the torrent of tears streaming down my cheeks.

For years, what seemed to me as being the oddest place to relocate a follicle was the ear lobe. It really takes a strong light, projected a certain way, to reflect off the individual hair to call my attention to it. But in the absence of that very specific angle of light, it could be weeks or months before I even see it, and could be growing wildly and creating a bit of a distraction without my knowing it.

The hint is when people are looking at me but not looking me directly in the eyes as they usually do. It’s like their gaze is fixed on something just a little to the left or the right of my face. That’s when I start to wonder if I have a stray hair growing off my lobe, waving emphatically at my interlocutor.

It’s only in recent weeks that I have noticed that little platinum hairs are starting to show up around the ear canal. What a moment of pride it has been to see myself bestowed with this rite of passage!

But it is the random hairs on my neck that that prevent me from saying goodbye to barbers completely. While I can easily give myself a clipper cut every 2 weeks, the reality is that I do need to make a periodic appearance to make sure that the slowly increasing neck fur is under control as well, and that I did not in fact smuggle in my cat under my shirt.

When it comes to the hunt for the “over 50” stray hairs, all I can do is laugh every time I see a sprout of new hair in a spot I could never imagine hair growth, and then to pull out the heavy artillery of grooming tools to try to keep it under control.

To me, the over-50 “hair game” is absolute confirmation that Mother Nature does indeed have a sense of humour.

Did you enjoy this post? If you did, your likes and shares are most appreciated.
If you haven’t already, please check out the rest of my blog at andrebegin.blog. From there, you can click on the “Follow” button to receive future posts directly in your inbox.
Sincere thanks for reading!
Have a great day,
André